CULTURE

DAN HILLIER - interview artist Dan Hillier, about his show ‘Ceremony’, held last year at The Saatchi Gallery.

MICHAEL WHYTE - we interview the late great Director and Cinematographer on his career.

THANK YOU, BERNARD.

In the 1940s, if you were the pilot of a fighter plane and you got hit, you had two choices:

1. Stay in your stricken plane and risk certain death.

2. Jump from your stricken plane and risk certain death.

Not ideal, to say the least.

Surely, the experts argued, there had to be a way to get a pilot out of his aircraft and bring him safely back down to earth?

The British company Martin-Baker were among those seeking an answer.

One of the co-founders, Valentine Baker, had died trying to land a crippled plane in 1942, and his partner James Martin had committed himself to the cause of pilot safety.

Within a couple of years, a prototype ejection seat had been built, using small explosive charges to send the pilot clear of the aircraft, and a parachute to land him safely.

It seemed to work on paper. But would it work in the air?

Clearly, somebody needed to test the seat. But who?

Step forward Bernard Lynch, a fitter at Martin-Baker.

It was he who bravely climbed into the very first Martin-Baker ejection seat.

And it was he who became the very first person to complete a mid-flight ejection, on 24th July 1946.

Bernard went on to complete more than thirty ejections.

The Martin-Baker seat was an immediate (and very welcome) success.

At the last count, the company’s ejection seats have saved more than 7,400 lives worldwide.

And though the present day models are rather more sophisticated than the 1946 model, everybody who uses one owes a debt of thanks to Mr. Lynch.

When we at Bremont came to design our pilot’s watch, the first thing we did was enlist the help of Martin-Baker.

A true pilot’s watch, we reasoned, should be able to withstand everything the pilot does. Including ejection.

Martin-Baker obliged by strapping our watch to the vinyl wrist of a crash test dummy, then shooting it out of the cockpit. Subjecting it to forces of up to 30G in the process.

Next, dummy and watch underwent a vibration test simulating 30 years in a helicopter. ( More than most helicopter pilots ever experience.)

And if all this suggests a watch that has been built for endurance at the expense of performance, nothing could be further from the truth.

Our latest model, the Bremont MBIII, is a beautifully-engineered mechanical chronometer.

It’s been certified as 99.998% accurate by no less an authority than the official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute.

While GMT movement means you can keep time in two different time zones (disproving the old adage that you can’t be in two places at once).

And it features a bronzed aluminium barrel, inspired by the anti-reflective coating found on cockpit canopies.

The Bremont MBIII is a tribute to both the craftsmanship of our home-grown watchmakers, and the engineering ingenuity of the Martin-Baker company.

But it also owes something to one brave man, who strapped himself into his ejection seat on that July day, nearly 70 years ago.

So. Thank you, Bernard.

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